Date: 1774
"As a rich soil produces not only the largest quantity of grain, but also the greatest profusion of such weeds as tend to choak it; so a fertile imagination, along with just and useful ideas, produces many trifling, false, and improper thoughts, which, if they be not immediately examined by reaso...
preview | full record— Gerard, Alexander (1728-1795)
Date: December 10, 1774; 1775
"The mind is but a barren soil; is a soil soon exhausted, and will produce no crop, or only one, unless it be continually fertilised and enriched with foreign matter."
preview | full record— Reynolds, Joshua (1723-1792)
Date: 1774
"Hence Princes generally neglect nothing which may bring luxury into esteem: they recommend it by their example; they display every where pageantry and magnificence, and are the first to sow in the minds of their subjects those seeds of corruption."
preview | full record— Marat, Jean-Paul (1743-1793)
Date: 1776-1789
"The ancient families of Rome had successively fallen beneath the tyranny of the Cæsars; and, whilst those princes were shackled by the forms of a commonwealth, and disappointed by the repeated failure of their posterity, it was impossible that any idea of hereditary succession should have ...
preview | full record— Gibbon, Edward (1737-1794)
Date: 1778
"A thirst for knowledge, which can never be gratified, would not have been implanted; a mind which was to be chained to the earth, would never have been bent on the skies"
preview | full record— Caulfield (fl. 1778)
Date: 1779, 1781
"A memory admitting some things and rejecting others, an intellectual digestion that concocted the pulp of learning, but refused the husks, had the appearance of an instinctive elegance, of a particular provision made by Nature for literary politeness."
preview | full record— Johnson, Samuel (1709-1784)
Date: 1781
"In his 'Night Thoughts' he has exhibited a very wide display of original poetry, variegated with deep reflections and striking allusions, a wilderness of thought, in which the fertility of fancy scatters flowers of every hue and of every odour."
preview | full record— Johnson, Samuel (1709-1784)
Date: 1779, 1781
"Pope foresaw the future efflorescence of imagery then budding in his mind, and resolved to spare no art or industry of cultivation."
preview | full record— Johnson, Samuel (1709-1784)
Date: 1782
"Vanity is a shoot from self-love--and self-love, Pope declares to be the spring of motion in the human breast."
preview | full record— Sancho, Charles Ignatius (1729-1780)
Date: 1782
"Your infants growing--with the roseate bloom of health--minds cultured by their father--expanding daily in every improvement--blest little souls!--and happy--happy parents!"
preview | full record— Sancho, Charles Ignatius (1729-1780)